Review of Director Aronofsky's The Whale

I just finished watching The Whale on Netflix, and I'm still processing how it made me feel. I started looking at other people's reviews, trying to determine whether it was a good film or not. And then that's when I realized, really realized, how truly subjective the industry is. There are people saying they love it and people saying it's one of the worst movies they've ever seen. Instead of looking at other people's opinions, I stopped myself from reading more reviews and decided that I needed to write my review. I didn't want other people's thoughts swaying my own. I was seeing a lot of critiques on it, and the more I read them, the more invalidated of my own feelings I felt; I felt like I wasn't supposed to be feeling like I did throughout the film, and I didn't like that. So, I came to the conclusion I need to write what this film meant to me without absorbing any outside influences.

The thing about art is it can never be objectively bad, it's not possible. Even that sentence itself I just constructed is an opinion I have. There's no research that's been done that actually proves art can't be objectively bad. My whole life, I've struggled with research because I've always been a writer writing my own experiences and so I wasn't used to having to research outside of my own self. Of course there are many purposes and projects for which I do need to research. Any time I'm writing something that isn't my own experience, I need to do that. But sometimes it's okay if I disagree with others on something, and I can't let my quest on improving my researching skills deprive me of my own opinions and feelings; I can't feel like I constantly have to back up my own feelings with facts. Absolutely not. There's a balance and so with this review, I'm merely going to write what was inside me as I watched the film. So here I go.

To give some background, the movie is about a man named Charlie who is eating himself to death. The film explores binge-eating disorder. He's an online English teacher who hopes to reconnect with his daughter whom he left when he fell in love with one of his past students. That student he loved passed away, and he lost control of his eating after that. The movie explores not only themes of body image, but also religion. Charlie is gay and left his wife and daughter for his student, Alan, and his student's sister is the nurse, Liz, who has been looking after him. Alan died after a lack of eating when he got depressed after he was expelled from his church for being gay.

As one can see, the film dealt with a lot of big topics, and so that's why I'm struggling with figuring out what I really got from them. First of all, I felt very connected to this movie and I think that's why I liked it. I struggled with disordered eating myself and I also joined a church group and ended up having to leave because in order for me to go on a mission trip, they essentially told me I had to also agree that homosexuality is a sin. And so I left after that, and I felt not welcomed after that.

I can't directly relate to Charlie. But I really appreciated the representation of his story, a story that we don't regularly get to hear about. Men struggle with eating disorders as well as women but their stories are rarely told. Also, despite binge-eating disorder being the most common eating disorder, I feel like there's been more media capturing narratives of anorexia and bulimia. I remember being shocked when I learned anorexia was not the most common. Also, Black communities have higher rates of binge-eating disorder, even though the media portrays eating disorders as being only a white, cisgender, and affluent woman's problem. The inaccurate and non-inclusive portrayal of only thin bodies blinds us from being able to see larger body types as having a disorder.

I feel we place more blame on a person who is overweight for their problems. We think if they just ate better or worked harder, then they wouldn't be like that. We fail to see the disorder and the bigger picture. It reminds me a lot of the way our society views the poor and those in poverty. When it comes to our welfare programs, many of them have work requirements, and so we blame the poor for being poor without seeing the bigger macro forces at play that have led them to that. Redlining, racial discrimination, oppression, institutional racism, etc. have led to poverty for certain individuals, but yet we continue to blame it on them.

So with Charlie, it made me think of this. He was eating due to grief, and he lost control, and I personally don't find that to be entirely his fault. He's mentioned that he's always been a larger size, so I can infer that he's faced fatphobia and homophobia as well. Alan was discriminated against due to his sexuality. According to a source, "Fatphobia in the gay community can have dangerous consequences, including increased rates of eating disorders among gay men." There's intersectionality at play here with Charlie who has two disadvantaged identities, his body size and his sexuality, and that has to be acknowledged. His poor health problems to a degree are based on his decisions, yes, but they have also been impacted by fatphobia and homophobia, and it's not all on him. That's my interpretation.

I need to acknowledge I've personally never had binge-eating disorder so I don't know if it was portrayed in a triggering way or in the wrong way, I can't know that. And I'm sorry if the representation in this movie has hurt anybody. But for me personally, I was able to identify with what it was like to have a poor relationship with food and for it to take over. I also am a writer, and seeing how in addition to his daughter, how literature and essays were Charlie's passion and got him through his problems, is something that helped me, too. He would read over his daughter's essay whenever he struggled to get up (and his daughter reading it would allow him to stand on his own for the first time), and to me it shows the power of writing. He would tell his students and his daughter to write something truthful and honest, and I think when writing follows these rules, it can be powerful. Writing a novel about body image and being true to myself and how I felt as I was writing it, it helped free me of my disordered eating. I think it did the same for him.

The ending shows him standing up after his daughter reads him her essay and his feet are shown slowly lifting off the hardwood, and he's lifted into an unknown source of light. An image of him at the beach is shown. It's ambiguous as to whether or not he's died. I can't say if he's died or not. I don't even know what I think. All I know is he's free of the struggles he was going through, and in my eyes, that makes it a happy ending. I think "weight" wasn't only something literal in this story, but also a metaphor for all the baggage and grief and challenges he had been carrying with him. He was able to let it go and therefore feel lighter and be able to be carried up with the light. I don't think it was a spiritual light. He had a bad relationship with religion, and I don't think someone or something saved him. I think he saved himself with guidance.

In conclusion, I think The Whale is open to interpretation. I'm not going to rate it a certain number of stars or anything like that, but I did enjoy it. It got me to think more and to feel something I'd never felt prior to viewing it, and that makes it a good film to me.